Kids often see the world different than others, ask different questions and in general are very different thinkers than the rest of the world. While the world was worrying about when the world would open up from Covid restrictions last year, they didn’t even know what was happening.
These kids are going to become the future engineers, doctors and lawyers but that’s not all they will become. They will also turn into future musicians, artists, photographers and videographers. While the former requires a bit of outside of the box thinking, the latter is built upon the creativity of this generation.
Hence, we need to know how to foster kids creativity so that we can not only continue to enjoy the art they create but also provide these kids with a safe medium of expression of their feelings. So How to foster kids’ creativity becomes an important subject.
Here are a few ways on how to foster kids creativity at a young age: –
1. Create a safe space for expression: –
A lot of very popular artists started to perform their art as a form of expression. That is what made them good at what they do. They did it with their heart and without a fear of being judged or made fun of.
While it is almost impossible not to be judged in this world, it is certainly possible not to create a safe environment for your child to express themselves in a way that they feel comfortable and happy.
In order to create such an environment, all you need to do is give your child some privacy to do their thing but also provide the tools for the activity. Meaning, if your child loves to write, get them books to help them write better and ask them if you can read their stuff. If they like to draw or paint, get them a canvas or a drawing book and let them do their thing.
Why Privacy? Instead of supervision.
Because as a human we like to judge but as a parent you want to correct your child’s mistakes, that correcting might turn into nagging and your child will stop having fun while creating that art. Supervision could be necessary for younger children so we’d recommend supervising from a distance like a baby camera for example.
2. Encourage Self- Expression
Encouraging Self-expression is an important aspect of fostering creativity because as a child your life is full of rules and regulations that you don’t understand the reasons behind. These rules and regulations sit in their minds as dos and don’ts. These make a rigid environment blocking them from being their creative selves sometimes.
This makes it essential to encourage self-expression in your kids. These kid’s are already creative.
How do you encourage Self-expression?
Let them do what they want to do and how they want to do it. Encourage them to create pieces of art if they’re interested in them. My teacher once recommended that since I watched a lot of cartoons as a child, I should write an essay about what happened in that particular episode and it was genuinely a great idea. I wasn’t interested in writing back then but writing about stuff that I actually loved was surprisingly fun.
Ask your young ones to draw, colour or paint something they liked or write about their day in a journal to clear their thoughts.
3. Ask Questions
Asking Questions is a beneficial for both parties. You get to find out more about your favourite artist’s latest piece and they get their hard-earned recognition.
How would you feel if one day everyone at the office starts to praise you, good right? What if that continued for the rest of the year? That wouldn’t be great.
It is the same with kids, if you keep praising them, they will get bored of it. Asking questions helps you and them, maybe they learned an idiom at school about a horse drinking water and they make a drawing about that at home. You’d never find out if you didn’t ask any questions.
Make these questions open-ended and about the art itself. Open-ended questions like “can you tell me about this drawing here?” Would let them take a lead in the conversation, telling you all about they’re day, week or month.
Asking questions allow you to find out things you would never know, like in the Netflix Show Atypical. Who would have thought that a stickman character could turn into a form of expression of feelings?
Creativity is what makes us feel alive as adults so fostering creativity in our kids becomes an essential practice. It also becomes truly important to for us to let our kid’s creativity fly because believe it or not, they could have an actual future in arts.
If you liked this article about how to foster kids creativity at a young age leave a comment and let us know. Here’s an article we recommend you read next- 5 Tips For Parents.
